Wishlist

See below for the wishlists for Leicester and Leicestershire created at the first Vision2020 event on 13 October 2010. Many points overlap because they are presented verbatim as collected from the unconference session. It’s up to Leicester to decide which ideas are taken up and how they might progress. Discuss the wishlists at LinkedIn

How to read the wishlists

Prospect Leicestershire has undertaken to update items as and when they are advanced. If you have news about an update, please send it to Sue Tilley. Hyperlinked items lead to updates.

The wishlists are organised below under rough topic headings (click to jump to each list):

• Wishlist for Green Space
• Wishlist for Finance
• Wishlist for Retail
• Wishlist for Transport/Energy
• Wishlist for using empty shops & offices
• Wishlist for Community
• Wishlist for Arts/Media
• Wishlist for Wifi/Internet

Wishlist for Green Space

1. Offer incentives to turn waste ground into green space (as Middlesbrough has done) Turn brown space into gardens, following Vancouver’s example
2. Allow landowners of brown spaces to let out their land to communities in return for free rates
3. Use brownfield sites and roofs for gardens and food production (even temporarily) Plant fruit trees in public places
4. Empty lots used as green spaces
5. City gardens / community gardens

Wishlist for Finance

1. Teach financial literacy in schools
2. Micro-payment mobile coops
3. Aim for a thriving community economy
4. Open source / community driven trade/barter of goods and services
5. Aim for a mixed economy e.g. attracting large companies such as Abercrombie & Fitch to move into vacant buildings e.g. Old Bank Building rent free for 2 years
6. Less power to supermarkets / fairer prices for producers
7. Have specialist independent profitable businesses
8. The city centre is full of clones and we need to redress the balance
9. Enable micro-payments via mobile phones
10. That energy companies charge less for the 1st unit used and more for later units

Wishlist for Retail

1. Local shops
2. Offer incentives to small businesses to invest in retail
3. Provide excellent retail training programmes
4. Completely rethink our approach to the retail experience
5. Offer a diverse range of shopping experiences
6. Reserve some high profile spaces on the High Street for local businesses to run pop-up shops and develop a customer base
7. Keep it fresh and changing
8. An open active retail network that includes *every* small to large outlet
9. Each lists their goods and special offers by the hour, day, week, month and displays reviews by the local community
10. Use the active retail list and put it on an open public document for developers to use.

Wishlist for Transport/Energy

1. Have a community-based traffic infrastructure
2. Increase the availability of bio-fuels
3. Community-based collection, filtration and distribution of fuel
4. Better public transport to get people out of cars
5. Circular/connected public transport routes, not just hub and spoke
6. Supplementary transport planning policy to help achieve our 2020 goals
7. Decrease (?) on-street parking
8. Put in cycle lanes
9. Oyster card for bus users
10. Mandates to empower advocates of sustainable technology
11. Continuous cycle paths – joined up policy
12. Safe cycle route on every road around the city
13. Shared routes / appreciation of cyclists
14. Affordable public transport – increased sharing
15. Bike hire scheme
16. Get rid of cheap car parking and surface car parks because they are unsustainable Charge for road use
17. Make manufacturers pay energy bills (doesn’t say what for)
18. ‘Merton’ (?) rule 10% renewable
19. Safe bike storage
20. No illegal car parks
21. Simplified and single easy fare for buses
22. Better cycle routes reclaimed from the highway
23. Integrated transport information systems
24. Good signage to allow more direct access and wayfinding
25. A fully integrated and customer friendly public transport infrastructure
26. Generate all our own energy
27. Everyone have decent, energy efficient homes
28. No traffic jams, being able to get into the city in half the time

Wishlist for using empty shops & offices

1. A Festival of Empty Shops
2. Students to work on physical buildings (?)
3. Pilot a hybrid (?) statutory voluntary use of buildings by non-profits including guidance and support
4. Repopulate the city by using unused office space as homes
5. Shared use of buildings via ‘squatting’ and ‘meanwhile’ spaces
6. Week-long arts events to use empty spaces and buildings e.g. motion graphics projected onto buildings
7. Food bartering/community sharing delivered through empty local shops (and give them rate relief)
8. Look at how building standards can be lowered to help commercial viability
9. Look at tax incentives can help the financial viability of building regeneration
10. Exhibition of artists/designers in unused buildings
11. Renegotiate methods of leasing
12. Planning controls
13. Cheap rents
14. Temporary buildings/pods to get a quick activity win
15. Encourage and create events and activities, festivals, displays etc
16. Pod buildings
17. Less council control
18. Proactive planning procedures
19. More demonstration projects like Oporto (?)
20. Access for creatives to private buildings
21. Less dispersal on the edge
22. To have found ways of bringing empty attractive buildings back into use
23. More local/small scale shops/industries

Wishlist for Community

1. Institutions and local businesses working together
2. Still have 3 universities doing Research and & Development and be applying it locally
3. Forums for people from different sectors and interests to meet and exchange ideas Draw out and make more visible projects / initiatives / stories of success
4. Coffee shop themed events (as a way of initiating conversations and dialogues) College students to discover success stories and make short videos about them posted on YouTube
5. Better access to equipment
6. Free machines made available through suppliers to communities
7. Community-based controlled and editable content
8. Bookbus service for areas of low income
9. Multimedia versions of all council, NHS etc documents
10. A recognisable and branded access point for trade and skill swaps
11. Longer lunch breaks to talk to new people and share ideas
12. Social media training
13. High proportion of existing buildings used for student accommodation
14. Map the resources we have
15. Publicise opportunities and resources
16. Build networks
17. Supporting communities and providing platforms for change
18. Assert qualitative side of education over quantitative
19. Balance between vocational and broad humanities
20. People throwing away less food and sharing/bartering what they have grown

Wishlist for Arts/Media

1. Media hotspots where people can access and choose local content (media, music, poetry, comedy, TV, radio) – interactive devices to access this content
2. Strong media networking group/event directory
3. Support community projects to create content
4. Produce a map of media based companies in the city
5. Arts in spaces including landmarks, projections and living artworks
6. Networks for resources and opportunities to get involved and create
7. Dedicated local Leicester channel for crowd-sourced and edited creative content, news and public info fed by tagging
8. More festivals and on-street activity
9. More dance classes, dance teachers, subsidised dance studio space
10. Channels for local content into local spaces e.g. big screen, cafes, bars
11. One-off annual events to create positive images of the city and increased cultural vibrancy
12. Integration of performance spaces for buskers/street entertainers
13. Digital arts incubators
14. Publicly accessible student art work

Wishlist for Wifi/Internet

1. Free wifi supporting council services, online voting and training programmes
2. Wi-max across the city
3. High speed internet
4. Wifi access more readily available
5. Encourage companies to work together to put in place a fibre-optic infrastructure City-wide wireless internet access
6. Devolve internet access to communities
7. Pilot wifi access in Braunstone including the ability to vote online
8. Encourage neighbourhood groups to champion mobile internet (as in Bristol)
9. Inform and train politicians and technophobes
10. Free wifi sponsored by major companies
11. City-wide free wifi
12. Collaborate with historical societies to use Layar (mobile phone application) to appreciate the layers of city landscape
13. Upgraded fibre optic networks installed as standard
14. Partner with BT or other to provide public wifi – free or cheap
15. Free wifi across Leicester/shire – or at least a subscribed model for anything beyond core council services
16. Same access charges as India (from John Thackara)
17. Trial free municipal wifi in one (poor) ward of the city– see http://www.muniwireless.com/ (from John Thackara)
18. Accessible hubs to access the internet and personal content within the city
19. City-wide wifi accessible to citizens
20. Networked hubs around busy areas
21. Building current technology into education better
22. Accessible power and charging hubs for mobile media devices within the city centre, preferably using rene wable energy sources
23. Have an email address that is as official as a street address and allows people to choose which one they would prefer to use
24. Smart phones for everyone
25. All councillors to be on the internet
26. Buddy system to help non ICT users become more competent
27. Ethics - define Leicester’s understanding of privacy and online presence
28. Use technology to ask residents what they do and don’t want in Leicester
29. Encourage councils and third sector to use technology for debate